Jose Arcadio Buendia's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Jose sheared the wool cow at dawn. The fleece piled up soft and white beside the barn. His plan was working. But the letter still sat in his mind. His last harvest was still owed to the buyers, and that corn still fed the clones. Cut it off, and the very people he wanted to free would starve. He did not know how to break the chain without breaking them first. Then he heard the screech. He grabbed the pitchfork and ran. Behind the barn stood the beast that guarded the clone facility. He knew it from Marsh's warnings. A rooster's crest, green scales, a beak like a hook. The clones feared it. It had wandered off, drawn by hunger, and now it stalked toward his open harvest barn where the corn and dragonfruit sat stacked. Jose did not run from it. He was tired of running. He set his feet and gripped the wooden handle. The creature lunged. Jose stepped aside and drove the tines deep into its neck. It thrashed, then fell still in the dirt. He stood over it, breathing hard. Then he understood. He called Marsh that afternoon. She came fast, still in her white coat. "You killed it," she said, looking at the body. "The buyers will notice their guard is gone." "Then they'll notice soon," Jose said. "But listen. I've been afraid of the wrong thing. I thought cutting the corn meant starving them. It doesn't have to." Marsh pushed up her glasses. "Explain." "The clones live in that dorm. Locked. Fed on my corn. If I stop selling, the buyers stop feeding them, and they die." He pointed at the dead beast. "But the guard is dead. The one thing that kept them penned. Tonight I feed them the last harvest myself. All of it. And I open the dorm." Marsh was quiet. "You free them instead of starving them." "The corn was the leash," Jose said. "So I take the leash and hand it to them." That night they drove the harvest to the clone dorm. Jose carried in bundles of corn and dragonfruit. He butchered the beast the clones had feared and cooked it in the yard. The clones came down from their bunks, slow and blinking. They ate the golden meat off the platter with their hands. They ate their fear. Jose broke the dorm's lock with the pitchfork. The door swung open on the dark fields. "Go," he told them. "No one owns you now." They scattered into the night. The last harvest was gone. The chain to that dorm was cut, not by starving them, but by feeding them free. But Marsh stood beside him and did not smile. "The guard is dead. The dorm is empty. The buyers will know by morning." She looked at Jose. "And they will come here first."